Friday, April 15, 2016

Windows 10 File Explorer Tweaks

If you're anything like me, you may like having things just so. I'm putting the finishing touches to a brand new AD domain (for personal use) and was creating the GPO for all of my commonly-used settings.

Part of those settings involved getting File Explorer tweaked to match all of the common preferences I like to use. Some of those involve Quick Access; namely, turning off the two options highlighted below: Show recently used files in Quick access and Show frequently used folders in Quick access. I go through an extraordinary number of files and folders on any given day (this is a development computer) and these two settings tend to clutter up things.
These can be easily turned off manually, but I was trying to get them turned off via a GPO so that it would apply to all my Windows 10 computer simultaneously. A preliminary search failed to turn up anything of interest, so I took to ProcMon, a tool from SysInternals, and had it watch the registry for any changes while I made the adjustment.

After some sifting through the logs, I finally found both registry paths. I've listed them below. I hope that this helps out someone else who may want to GPO these items.